A new documentary raises some questions about the challenges that newspapers are facing in the UK and the impacts that could have on our use of the media in campaigning.

We don’t have a UK equivalent to The New York Times, the paper of record in the US, but even so Page One – Inside the New York Times is a fascinating and thought-provoking documentary for any campaigner who wants to think about what impact the perfect storm of a decline in advertising revenue and the growth of social media will have on newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic and by extension campaigns that use them to raise public awareness of key issues.

The film spends a year or so, following the journalists on the Media Desk of The Times as they try to make sense of the changing media landscape and the need to cut costs, while at the same time breaking huge stories like Wikleaks.

Some of the themes that documentary picks up on are similar to issues that Nick Davies touches on his excellent book Flat Earth News which looks at the decline of news reporting in the UK, and a book I’d also recommend for anyone wanting to understand the challenges faced by many journalists.

For me as a campaigner, the documentary raised some great questions to reflect upon;

What’s the impact of a decline in the resources that are available to newspapers to dedicate to longer and more investigative pieces of journalism? Does this present an opportunity in the short-term where newspapers are more likely to work with campaigning organisation to provide these stories?

Will online sites like Huffington Post have the same resonance with policy makers? What takes the place of the columnist or editorials who cited as influencers. Will this increase the importance of key broadcast shows, like Today and Newsnight, when it comes to ‘setting the agenda’?

Will we see the same rapid decline in the ‘tabloid’ media? It not, do we have campaigns that were able to pitch to them?

What impact does a media model that is driven by ‘popularity’, for example the website group Gawker has a ‘big board’ that displays the 10 most popular stories, have on our ability to get campaign themes that aren’t interesting, but yet of critical importance in front of the public?

Is an increasingly open media environment a good thing because it makes it easier to get our messages out, or a bad thing because it makes it harder to get a critical mass of the public aware of our campaigns?

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Head of Mobilisation at Save the Children, was Head of Campaigns at Bond, co-founder Campaign Bootcamp, blog about campaigning because I'm passionate about seeing more campaigns win, election geek (and former Labour Party activist), interested in monitoring and evaluation, blog is all my own views. Prone to bad spelling!

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mrtombaker

Head of Mobilisation at Save the Children, was Head of Campaigns at Bond, co-founder Campaign Bootcamp, blog about campaigning because I'm passionate about seeing more campaigns win, election geek (and former Labour Party activist), interested in monitoring and evaluation, blog is all my own views. Prone to bad spelling!